BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA -- Around the world, the war against Islamic terrorism roars. But not in South America, where U.S. efforts to eradicate terrorists and their support networks are barely audible. Some governments here -- encumbered by economic difficulties, geographic complexities and anti-American feelings that would complicate a proactive or public antiterrorism campaign -- seem to be taking their cues from the United States and downplaying the risk that Islamic terrorism poses on their continent. All of which raises the question: Is the United States allowing its South American allies to ignore the threat of Islamic terrorism at their own peril -- and ours?
The United States may have recently raised the volume of its efforts, but only slightly. High-level U.S. officials met here this week with counterparts from Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. The discussions culminated on Wednesday with a visit by the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, Cofer Black, to the Triple Frontier where these three countries meet -- a supposed hotbed of terrorist activity where terrorists can blend into a population of more than 20,000 Middle Eastern immigrants.
Defense experts and press reports say that Islamic terrorist groups including al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah use the Triple Frontier area -- and now several other spots in South America -- to raise and launder money, recruit followers and hide terrorists fleeing capture. Brazil and Paraguay, emboldened by the quiet U.S. response to their insufficient anti-terrorism measures, have dismissed claims of terrorist activity. And as a result, public discourse in South America about Islamic terrorism is muffled, perhaps dangerously so.
A senior U.S. diplomat told me that there is no convincing evidence that al-Qaeda is operating in the Triple Frontier. On the agendas of South American governments and the U.S. agenda for the region, Islamic terrorism waits behind fiscal crises, trade negotiations and local terrorist groups such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). South America may be the only place in the world where the United States is seeking to diminish public expectations about the threat al-Qaeda poses regionally.
Of course, it is difficult to tell the true nature and extent of Islamic terrorist activities in South America. One can easily find former intelligence operatives with compelling information about terrorist groups, and they're often eager to provide contacts -- especially if there is the possibility of payment. But determining the veracity of their stories, or even their identities, is an uncertain endeavor. So one reason the U.S. government and its South American counterparts might be dampening talk of terrorism is that the threats are exaggerated.
Peter Hakim, director of the well-regarded Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, says the most frequently voiced concern -- that Islamic terrorist groups collect and launder money in South America -- is a minor issue. "If these are al-Qaeda's bankers, we don't have a lot to worry about. A terrorist group like the FARC would have far more access to drug profits than al-Qaeda," he says.
Nor, Hakim says, is South America an especially appealing target for al-Qaeda. "It just seems like the potential gain from terrorist action in South America would be small," he says.
Whatever its intensity and goals, terrorist activity in South America was, until recently, concentrated in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, a city on the Triple Frontier that has long been known for lawlessness and corruption. Stock trades there include arms and drug trafficking, contraband smuggling, tax avoidance, document and currency fraud, money laundering and the trade of pirated goods.
When Jeffrey Goldberg (no relation to me), in reporting an Oct. 28 New Yorker article on terrorism in the Western Hemisphere, encountered bureaucratic difficulties in entering the Paraguayan border city from Brazil, he sneaked in on a motorcycle with Brazilian plates, using only a helmet as disguise. Sergio Widder, Latin American representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, took an easier route from an Argentine border city to Ciudad del Este: He simply walked across the bridge connecting them. "The Triple Frontier doesn't have any kind of regulation. I crossed the border twice on foot, without them asking me anything, not for ID, not about where I was going," he says.
Experts concerned with terrorist activity in South America are no longer focused on Ciudad del Este, where the concentration of foreign-intelligence agents has prompted comparisons to Casablanca, Morocco, during World War II. They say that in the aftermath of September 11, when, according to The New York Times, 40 FBI agents scoured the area, terrorist groups have spread out to more hospitable cities in nearby countries, as well as to smaller towns and uninhabited areas near Ciudad del Este. Juan Belikow, a professor at Argentina's School of National Defense, and other Argentine security experts say the new sites include the Colón Free Trade Zone in Panama; Iquique, Chile; Maicao, Colombia; and Chui, Brazil.
Because of the dispersion of terrorist activity, Belikow calls the Triple Frontier "the quintuple frontier." He says that terrorist groups including al-Qaeda are closely linked with local and international mafias in the region. "The volume of illegal goods is so large that it allows other activities: arms and drug trafficking, identity theft, bank fraud, money laundering, immigrant trafficking. And among other things, the area serves as a refuge for terrorists who are overly exposed in other parts of the world." Members of terrorist groups, he and others say, provide "security services." Illegitimate businessmen use these services to threaten competitors or protect themselves. Legitimate businessmen are simply extorted. Either way, terrorists take a share of local profits.
Scores of people have been arrested in the Triple Frontier countries on terrorism-related charges in recent years, mostly for distributing or possessing false documents, or for tax evasion. Among those also arrested have been prominent terrorists and terrorist supporters.
Paraguayan anti-terrorist efforts since September 11 resulted in the rounding up of 23 people suspected of collecting funds for Hezbollah or Hamas, according to a 2001 State Department report. Prominent among them were three men linked to Hezbollah: Ali Saleh, Saleh Mahmoud Fayad and Sobhi Mahmoud Fayad. Most of the 23 were subsequently released, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As part of the same anti-terrorist sweep, a State Department report showed, Paraguayan authorities uncovered records showing the transfer of millions of dollars to Hezbollah in raids on local businesses.
One man who escaped Paraguayan officials was AssadAhmad Barakat, who fled to Brazil. Barakat wasconsidered to be Hezbollah's leading operative in theregion until his arrest on tax evasion and criminalassociation charges this June by Brazilian authorities. Argentine and Paraguayan prosecutors told CNN lastyear that Barakat was a major figure in two bombings in1992 and 1994 against Jewish targets in Buenos Aires.Until his arrest, Barakat lived undisturbed only a fewmiles from Paraguay and regularly gave interviews tothe likes of The Associated Press and National Public Radio. Yesterday, Brazil's Supreme Federal Tribunal voted to grant extradition of Barakat to Paraguay, according to Paraguayan and Brazilian news sources.
Terrorists related to al-Qaeda have also been arrested. El Said Hassan Mokhles and Muhammad Ibrahim Soliman, said to be major figures in the 1994 terrorist attack in Luxor, Egypt, that killed 58 tourists, have been arrested here and are in custody. Mokhles and Soliman are presumed to be members of Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda.
And Paraguayan authorities in July arrested two Lebanese men, Ali Nizar Darhoug and Muhammad Daoud Yassine, who were said to be collecting money for al-Qaeda, according to The New York Times. Yassine's name, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The New Yorker, was found in an address book belonging to the highest-ranking al-Qaeda official to be captured so far by the United States, Abu Zubaydah. Paraguay has no anti-terrorism law, and Yassine has been released and is reported to have fled the country. Darhough is being held on tax-evasion charges.
The arrests of Darhoug and Yassine add to a growing array of evidence that al-Qaeda is operating in the Triple Frontier area. According to The New York Times, a map of the region was found in an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan. And CNN found a large poster of the expansive Igauzu waterfalls, a major tourist attraction in the Triple Frontier, in the abandoned home of a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative in Kabul. The news station reported that top terrorist operatives met this fall in the Triple Frontier area to plan attacks against U.S. and Israeli targets in the Western Hemisphere. The CNN reports coincided with government terrorism warnings in Argentina.
Furthermore, Vanity Fair and Paraguayan newspapers have reported that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups may have established terrorist training camps in South America.
But even those who are skeptical about such reports -- and there is reason to believe that some press reports here are sensationalized -- acknowledge that several characteristics of the Triple Frontier area and its new offshoots could facilitate Islamic terrorist activities. These include significant populations of Middle Eastern immigrants that make terrorists hard to distinguish, the presence of anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments, a lack of cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence officials within an individual country and among multiple countries, and unmonitored expanses of desert and rainforest. "The Triple Frontier is the perfect hiding place, and if you have money, you can pay off any official, except maybe the Argentines," says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
The United States, however, remains diplomatically mum. A 2001 State Department report stated the Triple Frontier area "has been characterized" as a hub for Hezbollah and Hamas activities, and also notes that reports of al-Qaeda operatives in the area "had been disproved or remained uncorroborated by intelligence and law-enforcement officials." A senior U.S. diplomat said the 2002 report would likely repeat this statement about al-Qaeda.
"We never had evidence that people in Cuidad del Este are planning attacks in the United States," a senior U.S. Embassy official said.
The United States has made some efforts to publicize links between Islamic terrorist groups and South America since September 11. In December 2001, Francis X. Taylor, then the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, visited Paraguay and warned about Islamic terrorism. "Local support cells could be activated to conduct terrorist attacks here in the region," he said. U.S. lawmakers, including Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.), have also visited Paraguay. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discussed the Triple Frontier with his South American counterparts at a November 2002 conference in Santiago, Chile.
But here in South America, the remarks of U.S. officials have so far been lost amid the din of other issues, especially economic ones. On Tuesday, a leading Argentine newspaper, La Nación, ran a story about this week's multilateral meetings regarding the Triple Frontier. The article appeared on page 18 -- after stories about workers' salaries, fraud in a major primary election and the deadly riots one year ago that led the then-president to resign.
"The margin that South American governments have to pursue a very active foreign policy is slim, because almost all are very busy and immersed in trying to minimally order the economic situation and give their countries certain institutional stability," says José María Llados, academic secretary of the Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI), an Argentine think tank. "The foreign-policy urgencies of South American countries, and especially Argentina, are more related to economic and commercial issues -- issues of market access, the problems of payment and negotiation of their debts, foreign aid and negotiating economic agreements that are at least barely equitable -- than to terrorism."
The Inter-American Dialogue's Peter Hakim agrees. "When you have countries in deep financial problems," he says, "some of them in serious crises, with governments barely able to govern, to be asked to worry about this sort of vague threat that seems to be directed mainly against Israel and the U.S. just doesn't quite compute for them." There is even a perception here that Islamic terrorist groups will spare the region from attack to avoid focusing world attention on their fundraising and other activities in South America.
Still, it is easy to understand why the United States seeks to remain quiet when almost everywhere else it is abruptly, even belligerently, confrontational: South American publics are fed up with what they perceive, sometimes rightly, as U.S. hypocrisy and misdeeds in the region. Even when Rumsfeld told his colleagues, "I am not here to press any Latin American country to do anything" -- noting that it was not up to him "to opine what we think of their arrangements" -- he raised the specter of earlier U.S. interventions.
In a Nov. 24 editorial in Pagina/12, a major left-leaning Argentine tabloid, the former Argentine director of regional strategic security wrote, "Might it be that Mr. Rumsfeld and his colleagues that also participated in the Reagan administration -- like Vice President Dick Cheney -- never realized the costs of the anti-terrorist cooperation of the armed forces in the Americas? Does Mr. Rumsfeld have any idea of the number of dead and the costs that our societies are still paying to close the wounds of this tragic past?"
In the end, however, such criticism is misplaced. Some U.S. initiatives related to anti-terrorism, such as large increases in foreign military financing to the region or the continued training of civilian defense officials, reasonably draw scrutiny from those fearful that past U.S. abuses might be repeated. But Rumsfeld's logic -- that South American countries should devise their own methods for reducing terrorist activity -- actually supports both local sovereignty and human rights. To begin to combat terrorism too late could have dangerous consequences for civil liberties in a region where the rule of law is tenuous in several countries.
Ranstorp says he understands, nonetheless, why the United States is controlling its voice carefully. "I don't think they're being too quiet. This is a secret intelligence war," he says. "It probably will be unhelpful to take a confrontational stance. [U.S. officials] have to work with the local authorities; otherwise, nothing will get done."
But a policy of quiet has not thus far prompted South American countries to take strong steps. As Ranstorp says, in the Triple Frontier, "It's only the Argentines that are really dealing with it." Quiet means surrendering to corrupt officials and anti-imperialistic rhetoric rather than acknowledging that Islamic terrorism can devastate democracies and that South American governments may not be doing their job to prevent it.
With U.S. concern inaudible in South America, governments such as Paraguay's and Brazil's have remained lax in restricting comings and going across their borders, Ranstorp says. And Triple Frontier governments are able to endlessly blame one another for permitting criminal activities. Brazilians decry Argentina's financial-crimes agency, and Argentines point to deficiencies in Brazil's money laundering law. And it is easy to find fault with Paraguay, where police and court officials told Reuters that the president's BMW was purchased on the black market and possibly stolen. According to the news agency, 400,000 of the 600,000 cars in Paraguay are supposed to have been purchased on the black market, with a portion of profits perhaps going to Islamic terrorist groups.
Another common response to terrorist activities here is denial. After the multilateral meetings this week, the Brazilian ambassador to Argentina, Antonino Mena Goncalves, told the Argentine newspaper Clarín: "The conclusion of this meeting is not that there are transfers related to terrorism. There are suspicions that terrorist organizations collect funds. But there is not hard proof."
American tacit acquiescence may be creating a society-wide intelligence failure here. Andrés Fontana, a respected Argentine international-relations expert, says, "Latin American countries are not to be suspected of potential support to or harboring terrorist groups." I reminded him of the Triple Frontier area. "That's there. We're not trying to protect that. No intention to hide that. We have increasingly displayed security capacities in that border. It's true we don't have a strong policy to deal with that, but we don't have strong policies for anything." It seems that Fontana and others who make similar statements are failing to realize that not protecting and not hiding does not mean not harboring. South American countries are currently being permitted to meet terrorist activities with resignation -- and that should worry the United States.
In 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Argentina was destroyed, killing 28 people, and in 1994, the main Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was blown up, killing 86. Judge Juan José Galeano, who directs the investigation of the bombing of the Jewish community center, which was known by its Spanish abbreviation AMIA, has allegedly ignored promising leads and withheld and destroyed evidence, according to critics. In a videotape that was stolen and surfaced publicly here, Galeano is seen discussing a $400,000 payment with a defendant. The defendant later testified that Galeano offered him freedom and the payment to accuse a group of Buenos Aires Province police officers in the case.
Since September, Galeano has presided over the trial of 20 men on charges related to the bombing, but the defendants are all believed to be minor figures in the attack. The irregularities in Galeano's investigation have prompted the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to send an observer to the trial, according to Sergio Widder. And an investigation by Argentine authorities may lead to his removal from the bench. Furthermore, Widder warned, defects in Galeano's investigation could void whatever convictions the trial does produce. "It's conspiring against his own investigation," says Widder, and to dangerous effect. "The lack of investigation of the first and second bombings creates the opportunity for a third bombing, a third tragedy."
The United States, meanwhile, remains more or less mum. A senior U.S. Embassy official said that Judge Galeano has led a good-faith investigation of the AMIA attack, to which Argentine investigators have devoted "a lot of effort."
On a drizzly Monday morning outside the Argentine Supreme Court, I found Jorge Lew at a rally of Active Memory, a group of relatives of the AMIA bombing victims that makes these rallies a weekly ritual. I told Lew, whose wife worked in the social-assistance office of the AMIA before she died in the attack, that a U.S. official said Galeano's investigation was in good faith. "He must be a partner of silence," said Lew, whose face simultaneously showed resignation, and infinite perseverance.
Jonathan Goldberg is a writer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
